Story time

One day at work last week I was recording information off a tag on a cargo cart when I observed that the cart number transcribed on the tag did not match the cart itself. I suspected that someone had just misread the number, and I could change it myself; however, if the incorrect number was the one that was in the manifest, it could cause problems, particularly with those divas in OPS. So I sought out an airline cargo supervisor and asked him to check the manifest; it turned out that the incorrect number was in fact on the manifest. The supervisor would correct the situation on his end, but he asked me if I would go to OPS and inform them of the correction; I said to him that I would do so, but in my mind I was saying “Oh swell. Thanks a lot.”

Now, my favorite work of fiction is Voltaire’s “Candide.” It’s a quick read, but packs a big punch. A passage in it quickly came to mind concerning what kind of encounter I could expect to "greet" me:

“This nobleman carried himself with a haughtiness suitable to a person who bore so many names. He spoke with the most noble disdain to everyone, carried his nose so high, strained his voice to such a pitch, assumed so imperious an air, and stalked with so much loftiness and pride, that everyone who had the honor of conversing with him was violently tempted to bastinade His Excellency.”

Of course, I do have practical reasons for feeling the way I do. I can’t print out a gate sheet that has the correct gate locations without the damn thing being completely obsolete after two hours at most. If these OPS people are playing a game, it must be “musical gates”—except that the “game” is no game to people who have to waste time retrieving and relocating carts. Some gate swaps can’t be helped, such as when an airplane has a mechanical issue, but most of the time it is completely arbitrary; they’re worse than Metro, and who wants Metro running an airline? Another issue is the rather more frequent than necessary failure to accurately calculate loads, leading to bumped carts; these “bumps” occur well after the loads are manifested, and occasionally even in the middle of cargo being loaded onto a plane. Only a small percentage of flights are effected as such, but it occurs often enough that the cargo manifest procedure was changed so that less cargo was distributed in more carts. As I mentioned last week, this increased my workload by twenty percent; I don’t mind it since the busier I am the faster the day goes (and it is a long day), but it doesn’t increase my respect for what goes on in OPS.

So, I made my way to OPS, hoping that the go-between employed by my company was there to pass-on the message. He was nowhere in sight. I asked someone who was the person handling the particular flight the cargo applied to, and I was directed to that person. She was busy with plainly non-business related talk with another person who apparently had nothing in her cubicle to keep her occupied, so I went on the other side in order to be noticed. The person I needed to speak to knew she had been pointed out to me for the purpose of passing on information, but she continued as before until I had the presumption to open my mouth. When I spoke, it was like “What is this noise I’m hearing? Is that a fly?” Since I was standing opposite of this other person she was speaking to, she had to turn; her expression said “Do I have to turn my head to speak to YOU?” I attempted to explain to her why I was being forced to speak to her, which obliged her to break-off her conversation with this other person, and in the most excruciating manner imaginable she forced herself to turn her torso in my direction. I had not intended to make such a pest of myself to this imperious grand wizard of the cubicle, but by then I had begun to take some malicious delight in forcing her to actually take notice of me in what apparently was for her the most laborious way possible. Fortunately, the company representative showed up, and I was able to break off that conversation and convey to him my information, and I vacated premises forthwith to get on with life.